Thursday, August 27, 2009

As Promised, The Nominees For Best Actor Of 1929-30

I had planned to post the essay naming the best actress of 1929-30 today but as the cat said in The Manchurian Candidate, "My dear Yen, as you grow older, you grow more long-winded. Can't we get to the point?" No, no we can't. I'm at 1200 words and haven't even started talking about the movie yet!

Besides, I keep feeling this compulsion to pass the time with a little solitaire ...

In the meantime, as I promised faithful reader lupner, these are the nominees for best actor of 1929-30.

Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front)

Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)

Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)

Hopefully, I'll get to the winner early next week, but in addition to the best actress post, I also plan to write about the actual Oscar winner of 1929-30, Norma Shearer, as well as the other half of her power couple marriage, Irving Thalberg. So no promises.

Trivia: For those of you who have forgotten or never knew, that wooden stick in Ronald Colman's right hand is called a "pencil." Way back in the day, people used it to text and twitter, only instead of tapping out messages on their phone, they scratched out a sort of hieroglyphics on paper, put the result into physical containers called "envelopes" and handed them over to a uniformed employee of the United States Postal Service who would sometimes take days to deliver the message to its intended recipient. To kill time while waiting, people drank a lot and had sex and whatnot. By the time the "letter" would arrive, of course, everybody had forgotten what had inspired the message in the first place, but nobody much cared either.

I'm not saying it was a better world—they also had polio and wars that killed millions—just a different one.

Your kids, too, will one day ridicule you as an old geezer. And they'll be right.

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What are the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards?

Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.

To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:

The Silent Oscars

About Me

Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?